Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On Explores Sex in the Internet Age

“Porn today is sex education,” says Erika Lust, an erotic filmmaker based in Barcelona, early on in the first episode of Netflix’s new docuseries, Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On. A spinoff of the 2015 documentary Hot Girls Wanted, this new show explores sex and relationships in the Internet age; a time in which a woman can make a living simply by stripping in front of a camera in her bedroom, and a bachelor has unlimited access to date hundreds of women on his phone with a simple swipe.

The six-episode series was produced by Rashida Jones, Jill Bauer, and Ronna Gradus, the team behind the original film, which initially followed a group of teenage girls entering the amateur porn business in Miami. Here, they expand their focus from porn into all aspects of human sexuality online. One episode revolves around a cam girl and her intimate relationship with one of her customers, whom she’s never met in real life. Another chapter explores the question of whether a woman can ever be empowered in the porn industry—the answer is murkier than you might believe. Another centers on a pair of female erotic filmmakers and their efforts to try and challenge the pervasive, and often aggressive, male gaze in pornography.

In preparation of their series, the producers of Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On worked with researchers at Indiana University, in affiliation with the Kinsey Institute, to gather stats from its first-of-its-kind study on the effects of porn use on relationships and socialization in teenagers and adults. The conclusions of their study are peppered throughout the episodes and we quickly learn, like Lust says, that young adults (even children) are getting much of their information from pornography. Almost 40 percent of teens have seen porn by the time they’re 14 years old. And yet, more than 50 percent of them have only had 2 days or less of sex education. Can you really blame them for looking for information online?

The series also delves into the fact that the information porn is delivering is usually less than ideal. The porn industry, for one, is shockingly racist: People are often reduced to being described by the color of their skin. And there’s a class problem too, as a majority of the young women participating in it mainly come from poor, rural backgrounds with little hope of a future back home. In turn, they are often coerced into situations they’re not entirely comfortable with—nearly a third of all porn clips have physical acts of aggression of which women are the target 94 percent of the time—even though there are ways to remain in the industry without having to go down that path. (One of the doc’s subjects, a porn superstar called Bailey Rayne, shows there are rare possibilities to become successful on a female porn star’s own terms.)

So why aren’t more people talking about this? Why are we allowing an entire generation to learn about sex through Google and YouTube, or more likely, YouPorn? Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On begins that conversation in a thoughtful, inquisitive manner. It’s not trying to shame modern sexuality, it’s trying to understand it. Below, a discussion about the docuseries with the producers.

Why did you decide to expand the film into a docuseries?Jill Bauer: Really, the stories just kept coming. This intersection of sex and technology, porn and relationships, social media; all of it is connected. Oftentimes porn is something that people don’t talk about.

Ronna Gradus: When people know you work in this field, any party you go to, any dinner you go to, people just have stories they want to tell you because they feel like you will understand.

Rashida Jones: It’s made my conversations more interesting, so I hope it’s made other people’s conversations more interesting, too.

How did you decide on these six specific subjects?Gradus: There were a couple of stories that were from the cutting room floor of our doc because there’s only so much you can put in a film. We were very intrigued by the male experience in porn, and we had also noticed that there’s a lot of racism in porn. We became very aware of camming because all the girls in the house did camming on these sites. And then we found the Tom and Alice story [the Web cam girl and her client] because Jill and I have gone to a handful of porn conventions and we’d seen a lot of guys like Tom wandering along the convention and thought, That’s a great story.

How did you find James, the serial bachelor who compulsively dates and dumps women on Tinder and Bumble?Bauer: That was probably our hardest episode to cast because nobody wanted us to follow them around as they’re dating on Tinder.

Jones: It’s no mistake that he’s an ex-reality TV guy.

Gradus: One of the guys we tried to put in the episode sounded great; he lived in New York. I was texting with him to meet for a coffee and he totally ghosted me and I thought, “Isn’t this ironic?”

The first episode follows two female erotic filmmakers with very different experiences in the business. Holly, the one based in L.A., is floundering because her high-production porn films are being pushed out by amateur movies. And then you have Erika Lust, who’s doing great in Barcelona and has an entire staff of people working for her in a beautiful office space. Why do you think one is doing better than the other?Jones: I think it’s a lot of reasons, but mainly it’s that they live in different countries. I don’t know a lot about the porn industry in Europe, but it seems to me that Erika’s business is subscription-based and the whole art, the aesthetic of it, the conceit, feels more European. She works there, so it’s probably easier for her to sustain that. Holly instead came into the business by having this mom who pioneered all these things back in the ‘70s. She wanted to do the same thing that she was brought up doing but there’s less room for it today. I don’t know if she would ever have just a subscription-based business, but the truth is, we’re American; we love our free shit.

In Europe, sex is also treated differently than over here, where it’s very taboo. Erika Lust even premieres her films in a theater.Jones: I think you’re right that it’s just a sensibility. You can be naked on TV in Europe; it’s just not a big deal. Nudity and violence are not equated in Europe the same way they are here. Meanwhile, here we have so much violence on TV, more than any kind of nudity, we’ve glorified violence and we’ve shamed nudity. It makes absolutely no sense, and I think that is very much reflected in porn.

You interview Jax, a guy who has worked in porn for a while, and he mentions how he’s always very uncomfortable when they ask him to get aggressive with women in his work.Gradus: That was what was so great about finding Jax. Violence in porn is pretty normalized. I think a lot of young people are growing up watching it. We’ve done a study and we’re finding that choking behavior in teenagers is much higher than it was 20 years ago and that’s not a coincidence. So for young people to see this big, handsome, stud of a man saying he doesn’t actually like that, that he prefers sensual sex, that’s great. It’s great for people to hear and think maybe there is another way to have sex.

Are you envisioning a second season for *Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On?*Jones: I hope so. There are so many things we didn’t get into. We didn’t talk about gay porn, we didn’t talk about VR, we didn’t talk of porn as sex-ed. We tried, but it’s hard with kids.